Other People’s Money: Dash Riprock and the Human Piranha Revealed

this was for me. This was like, huh, I'm going to Solomon Brothers and going to play at being an investment banger. Why not dress the part. I didn't realize that I was about to enter an irony free zone. I was just trying to make work fun and instead I looked like this asshole who actually would wear red suspenders with gold dollar signs. And it was it came across literally, you were the wolf of Wall Street. I

was the wolf of Wall Street. I was not. It was like the antelope of Wall Street or the or the rabbit of Wall Street. I was not at the Wall Street. Hi, I'm Michael Lewis, once the rabbit of Wall Street. Welcome to other people's money a Liar's Poker Companion. Thirty years after I published my first book, I'd gone back and recorded the whole thing as a new audio book. The book is what it is as I wrote it, but this is where I crack opened all the stories

behind the book. We're now at episode two, Churning and Learning on Wall Street, one of the many titles I considered and rejected for the book as a whole. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing on Wall Street, and when I got to Solomon Brothers, they were people who were apostle to my ignorance. But there were people who helped me along and kind of taught me stuff, sometimes while even knowing they were doing it. And these

people found their way into the book, often pseudonymously. So just recently I went back to a couple of these people to see kind of what they were remembered from that time. One of them was a bond salesman who was next to me at the desk where they plopped me down in London when I got out of the training program. In the book, I called him dash rip Rock,

and here's how I described him. He was American and only twenty three two years younger than I. Still in the way of the world, he was light years ahead of me. Dash rip Rock was a proven moneymaker. Dash often made remarks I didn't understand, such as buy two year notes and short Old Tens, or short Solomon stock, or save a client, shoot a geek and expect me to figure out why on my own. Often I hadn't a clue what he meant. But Dash, for all his pithiness,

had a kind heart. And eventually, after he had sold four different money managers in three different countries on whatever new scheme he was promoting, he'd elaborate. In this way I learned about trading, selling and life. You called me up to Hampstead to your house and said I want you to look at something one night. So I went up there, and that's when you showed me like a lot of hand think. It was handwritten, it was typed out.

It was like three hundred pages typed out. And I sat and read it, and then I looked at you and I said, you're going to sell seven thousand copies to the seven thousand employees of Solomon Rose, and then you're going to be unemployed and never get another job on Wall Street again. And you laughed and said, I've already sold the rights. It's coming out, ladies and gentlemen. I'm now in a position to reveal, for the first time ever the true identity of my first mentor at

Solomon Brothers, Dash rip Rock. His real name is Scott Door. I said to you, I go, you have to change the names in this book because I'm making fun of the chairman. I'm making fun of you, I'm making fun of the firm. I'm hazing you mercilessly. It's you know, the pledge training all this, And I was like, you really have to change my name because I'm not ready to leave the business here at the age of whatever, twenty six or whatever I was at the time, as

I remember it. When I asked Scott what he wanted his pseudonym to be, he already knew. Now Dash rip Rock turns out to be a character from the nineteen sixty sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies. Don't but he ain't no Dash. And the training program there was a book equivalent of the Pickbook, you know that they sent out a freshman year in college back in the day, and they had all the pictures of all the people. It was probably

one hundred twenty five people in that class. And I had nicknamed one guy in the class dash rip Rock because he was that guy lived on Park Avenue, you know, drove a Porsche, you know, had you know, five thousand dollars suits in nineteen eighty three, you know, so I thought that was a funny name, so I just stole

it back from him. So when you read it, your takeaway was everyone, as Solomon Brothers, is going to read it, but no one else is going to be interested, right, I thought it was too much inside baseball at the end of the day. You know, what do you put on the cover? You know, I'm a bond salesman. I mean, who who cares? I mean, you know, nobody. There was no glory or drama in that world until really until

your book. Did you do you remember the reaction in the firm when the book came out, a mix of horror, fear, and glee. I'd say it was like reading page six in the Posts, only three hundred pages of it there. You know, it was a parlor game, all right, who is this guy? And the ones that you protected by using pseudonyms and another were the ones you didn't protect? By putting their real names in. I think. I think I mainly protected the little people and mainly didn't protect

the big people. The real names were the names of the people who were kind of prominent in the firm. But did people quickly figure out you were Dash Rip Rock Oh in thirty seconds? Yeah? Did you think, oh, I'm in trouble. Oh? I went I was, you know,

looking for another job fairly quickly. But at the same time I was not super comfortable with you know, what was going on, and I got from a bond department at the time and who I was reporting to and responsible to, so and as you saw what happened shortly afterwards, firm fell apart. It was a good time for you to write that book and me to be forced to leave. Did you feel like you were forced to leave by the book? Yeah? Yeah, absolutely, I didn't know that. Really,

It's okay, I don't blame you. What's funny about that is Scott and I had stayed in touch after Solomon Brothers, I mean loosely, and he never said that basically I'd ruined his career there, never brought it up. He'd gone on to have a long and very lucrative career, Like a lot of the people who I was at Solomon Brothers with, we all hit there at just the right time, with this kind of tidal wave behind us to serve.

And he'd gone through a number of banks and hedge funds and had only just a few months before I spoke to him retired, But he was still struck compared to all those firms. How much power Solomon Brothers had exercised back in the day, Like how different a place it was in relation to the rest of the financial system. It can't be exaggerated in terms of how much you control we had over the level of US interest rates and therefore global interest rates at that period, because there's

obviously nothing now to compare. It's interesting what you just said about control of interest rates, because Solomon didn't have control of interest rates. I mean, the Fed has control of interest rates, so but on a very micro level, like where this bond trades in relation to this bond, No, but on the absolute level of rates in a way even now, you know, a single hedge fund or a single player can momentarily have a big impact on one sector of a market or one specific issue or something

like that. But back then Solomon until a number of events shrank their control. There were periods where they would go in and they would buy every single thing that the Treasury would auction, and they would just keep buying, and if any prices went down, they would just buy more until they turned things around. And that worked at an incredibly high percentage hit rate because they were willing to lose more money than anyone else on the path

to making a ton. Solomon Brothers may have felt like it was an incredibly powerful position entrenched, but even then its privileged position was under assault. We just didn't fully realize it. It was just a different culture than say, Silicon Valley is where everybody knows enough to be paranoid. Everybody knows that someone's coming to get you and will things were coming to get us, and we were oblivious

to it. What happened was that the banks and the investment banks went from much smaller organizations, you know, with people who could jump around department a department with history majors trading bonds, to much more specialized worlds where you know, you have thousands of PhD programmers who are fighting to get one algo a millionth of a second faster than another algo and that there's no narrative that really helps there.

Your potential role is shrinking the whole time, right, it's becoming much more just you're sitting at the casino and putting your chips on red or black as opposed to having an edge. You know, the anomalies have been arbitraged out of the business, which is how we made our living for the last thirty years. And when did you

realize you come to the end of the line. When I left the last European bank, who would have been around fifteen, I went to work for a client, and I went to work for a large global macro hedge fund where you were basically trading, yes, doing some analysts work. I was writing for the firm, But there's essentially it's essentially acknowledgement that there isn't really much of a role

for the bond salesman. Correct If I went back and wandered the trading floors in the hedge funds of Wall Street, now would I see anything that's even vaguely familiar to me? Or has the world changed that much? No, it's nothing that was familiar. So the world that Liar's Poker describes is thoroughly changed, but Liar's Poker itself remains in some kind of time warp eternity. Why on earth are people handing this book out to kids at Harvard and saying, you got to read this if you want to know

how our business works. You know, it's because it's a really fun era and it would give a you know, someone young who was idealistic about coming in and being able to make a difference. You know, it gives them some hope that is obviously completely misplaced given the modern trading environment. Gives them some hope of what that that they could have some fun. So that's the fund's been

bled out of it. Yeah, there's no there's no eating goldfish, you know, standing up in front of five hundred people in the trading form Solomon London anymore. So it's used to persuade young people that this is still a place full of life, where really what it is is a place full of machines and silence. There's just no noise. That's the amazing thing about particularly hedgephones, even more than the banks. You know, you're just basically tending the machines.

No one actually talks on the phone anymore. That's the most obvious physical changes. People used to stand up on their desks and yell and get an arguments and occasional fist fights, and then they were on the phone, and you know, there'd be one hundred open phone lines, and it was just this huge cataclysm of noise and risk and fear and greed. It was it was a drama. There's no drama, now, He's totally right. There was a drama, and the telephone was at the center of the drama.

I mean, the mortgage traders would hurl the phones at people's heads. There were weapons in addition to like instruments of communication, and when you walked onto the floor, you could hear all, you know, a thousand voices at once shouting into phones, shouting each other. But Scott aka Dash wasn't like that. You can hear from his voice that he's not a shouter. He's a low talker, and he

would mumble into his phone. In the book, it was his phone technique that I used to introduce him to the I could tell when Dash was about to sell a few hundred million dollars of government bonds because his torso would jackknife in his chair so that his chest was almost in his lap, and his head went into the sound booth. Just before consummating the trade, he'd plug his empty ear with a finger on his freehand and speak rapidly in a low voice. One of his customers

nicknamed him the Whispering Dash. Then suddenly he'd pop up, hit the silencer button on his receiver, and shout into the hoop, Hey, New York, New York, You're done. On October ninety two to September ninety three, one oh yeah, one hundred million by one hundred and ten millions. When he emerged from the tuck position without having sold bonds, I knew he'd been talking to his mother. It wasn't cool to talk to your mother on the trading floor.

I love describing your phone technique the low talker. You were a low talker and you would sometimes high actually go underneath your desk so nobody could hear you. Why, Well, it was loud, Yeah, really loud. And the fact is, if you're in the middle, if you're orchestrating a transaction of you know, a billion dollars worth of bonds that are moving really rapidly in price, and the money to be made or lost is really large. Sums. You really

don't want a trader's shouting, yelling, hectoring abuse. You don't want that leaking through into the phone, because the trader would be screaming, I hate that customer, you know, hang up the phone, I'm never doing another trade, and you're under the thing. You don't want him to hear that as you complete a transaction and hope he'll come back ten minutes later for another one. So that's why you did it. It was editing. I thought you were afraid of people hearing what you were saying. Oh no, no,

not at all. You were afraid of the person on the other end of the line hearing what everybody around you was saying. Right, you can't let the truth leak through. You can't let the truth leak through. This great line, very dash, rip Rock. I want to thank Scott Dorff for revealing himself to the audience and for talking to me.

Coming up after the break, we have one more pseudonymous character from Liars Poker whose identity we're going to reveal, maybe the most famous character in Liar's Poker, the human Piranha. Welcome back. In Liar's Poker. There's a long section, probably too long a section about my education in the Solomon Brothers training program, And for me it was a way of like explaining to the reader all about Wall Street through these people who came before us, who knew all

about Wall Street. And these people were colorful and interesting. But one of them was just more interesting than all the others, and he was the human Piranha. The human Piranha came to tell us about government bonds, though he was so knowledgeable about the handling of money that he

could have spoken about whatever he wished. He was the only bond salesman who made traders nervous because he generally knew their job better than they did, and if they screwed up by giving him the wrong price, he usually made a point of humiliating them on the hoot and holler. It gave other salespeople great satisfaction to watch him do this. The human Piranha was short and square, like the hooker on a rugby team. The most unusual thing about him

was the frozen expression on his face. His dark eyes black holes really rarely moved, and when they did, they moved very slowly, like a periscope. His mouth never seemed to alter in shape, rather it expanded and contracted proportionately when he spoke, and out of that mouth came a steady stream of bottom line analysis and profanity. I love the environment, you know. I love the tension, the competitiveness, how fast moving it was, you know, psychologically, I loved

the immediate feedback of doing a big trade. So that's the human piranha. Unlike dash rip Rock, I was too scared of the human piranha to call him and ask him what he'd like his pseudon him to be, so I just gave it to him. His real name is Tom Bernard. He was only, like, I don't know, six years older than me, though at the time he seemed like the soul and the embodiment of a firm that

had been around for a hundred years. I thought of him as the person who had sort of created the firm culture, or helped create the firm culture, but in fact, like everybody else, he had just adapted to it. The thing that really struck me about the culture that's very different and something that you know, I've had to unlearn the behavior over the years was a gallows schumer. When any thing really bad would happen, there was always a

race to who had the gallows jokes the quickest. Yeah, I encountered that day one at Salomon Brothers, and that lasted through you know the Liar's Poker years when you say, when something bad happened in the world, Well, if a celebrity would die, you would call around and the guy who had the sickest jokes the fastest, you know, would

get all the high fives. I remember coming out to snowmass to ski, and I had been on the phone with the office all morning, and so I'd gotten all the latest jokes on celebrity death, and so I'm on a ski lift with these Midwestern ladies and I started rattling off the jokes and they looked at me like, what rock did this guy just crawl out from money? They couldn't wait to get off to ski left with me.

So it was kind of an Aha moment. I realized that that that stuff really doesn't travel outside of Wall Street. Where do you think it comes from? What's its purpose? That's a great question. I guess the idea that you can, you know, kind of break social boundaries, or I'll tell you one story it actually happened. The culture was the same, but this happened in the early nineties when I was

at kid or Peabuddy. I sit right on in a trading desk, and I'm always listening to all the conversations, and it appears that this guy is scolding a clerk, which you know, we yelled at our clients, and we yelled at our competitors, and we alled at each other, but you know you didn't yell at a clerk. Kind of my ears perked up. And the last thing the guy says is, Okay, well, I guess you got one less guy on the assembly line, so it's going to take a little longer. Just get him here by Thursday.

He hangs up, make turn around and say, Mike, what are you doing? What is that about? And Jeffrey Dahmer had been arrested at weekend for cannibalism, and my salesman was on the phone with the Ambrosia Chocolate factory in Milwaukee ordering crates of candy. They were going to call them damer bars. They were crunchy and send them all to all their customers. And you know, you had to guess what you were crunching on. So I'm the adult in the room, you know, was ahead of the group.

So I was supposed to be the adult in the room. But I realized there would be a mutiny if I shut this down. So I negotiated that they couldn't send any damer bars to the Wisconsin accounts because somebody had a cousin or whatnot that god eaten by Jeff. You know, wouldn't be as funny, but it would be. So when the bars arrived on Thursday, everybody dropped their phones and jumped on them to send them to clients, and you know, go with this Gallo's joke. So that's the kind of

thing that would not happen anymore. Yeah, that wouldn't happen anymore. There's so much that happened that wouldn't happen anymore. And yet, you know, I'm not totally sure that deep down underneath the surface of the behavior, the spirit of the place has changed at all. Back then you just saw the spirit of the place on the surface. Anyway, this is the human piranha Tom Bernard who had one really big effect on me. He was the one who sort of

let me know I'd really made it. Its Solomon brothers An. He did it in a particular way that people still talk to me about This is how I described it in the book. The most important call of all came. It was from the human Piranha. I heard you sold a few bonds, he said. I tried to sound calm about the whole thing. He didn't. He shouted into the phone. That is fucking awesome. I mean fucking awesome. I fucking mean fucking awesome. You are one big swinging dick, and

don't let anybody tell you different. It brought tears to my eyes to hear it, to be called a big swinging dick by the man who years ago had given birth to the distinction, and in my mind, had the greatest right to confer it upon me the legacy. Before the lights go out on Liar's poker, the last flash is going to be just big swinging dick. That's the thing thing everybody remembers. And it wasn't mine, it was yours. But where did you get it from? You know? It

was something that was said on the trading desk. I never heard it until I got to Selomon Brothers. And I think that the young people kind of bastardized the meaning, because when I would hear good Friend or Strauss or

you know, Craig Coats, the senior guys use it. They would use it in the context of, you know, if there was an opportunity to take a ton of risk, they would say, well, if we don't buy them, you know, some other swinging dick will come in, and it meant that, you know, you were on the edge of being overly aggressive, and you know, some big swinging dick will come in and take down a block of you know, half a

billion over priced from GMAC. But then as the eighties went on, it the definition became just as it was in Liar's Poker. So it went from being something a term of maybe slight opprobrium or disapproval to a compliment. That's my perception. Yeah, yeah. What's funny about that is something similar happened with the book itself, not just since I saw him the brothers. I think inside the mind of John Goodfriend, the CEO, in the beginning, he did

not regard it as a compliment. And Tom Bernard remembers that beginning this Monday morning, John Goodfriend begins a meeting by describing your book. He says that one of our employees, in line of Michael Lewis, has written this book Liars Poker, and he gives his view, which was not very positive, but he said he said that he thought we all should read it, but he didn't want us to buy it because he didn't want you to get the royalties.

So right after the meeting, I ran out to the syndicate desk, which was, you know, right outside the meeting room, and our publicist, Bob from North Carolina was there. Do you remember him? Yeah? I do remember him. So I went up to him. He had the galleys and I said, Bob, am I in this book? And he said yes. I said, am I in it by name? And he said no, but you'll recognize yourself. So I looked around and good

friend wasn't there. So I ran out to Barnes and Noble to buy the book because I was, you know, in curious, curious what you had said about me, and so I'm looking around in the fiction section. I couldn't find it, and I went up and asked the gentleman at the connor. I said, you know, do you have Liar's pokon? He points over to the nonfiction section and I said, why is that in nonfiction? And that that was the question I had after good Friends. You know

description of the book. You know, after I read it, I realized, you know this is true. I don't know why I asked a guy, because you know it's you know, it was a very accurate portrayal of the environment at Solomon at the time, and you know everything you said about me, and you know it was true. Your character as it appears before the Trading class is maybe the second thing that will go out last with a book. People remember the human Pirunha. You were scary? Did you were?

You were aware that you were scary? No, I was aware that I was intense, but you know, it was a very very intense environment, you know I was. I think you called me a Dennison of the trading floor, and I was thriving on it. So good Friend tells everybody to go read it somehow without buying it, which would have been hard to do. Oh yeah, I think

everybody had Salomon Brothers read the book. I think there was a feeling among many that it was you were telling stories out of school that yeah that if you know someone talks about infidelity at the country club with the guys and it gets back to the wives, you know that that person isn't too popular and with the guys anymore, you know, So there was some of that that, you know, you were a bit of a tattle tale.

It was the one little niggling feeling of kind of guilt I had about the whole enterprise was telling stories out of school, and if if there had been any real cohesion in the firm, I probably never would have written in the first place. But I would say something that's funny, and it's a code of the whole story, and it's that. As time went by, John Goodfriend himself softened in his attitude towards the book. He would come to like any public talk I was giving in New York,

and we would chit chat afterwards. And then he confessed that he'd bought hundreds of copies and he kept him in his office, and he'd signed them and given them away to people when they came to visit him. So we come full circle. We come to a place where everybody seemed to be kind of okay with it in the end, and you can hear the human Piranha is not really the human Piranha anymore. He's softened. All those rides on ski lifts and Aspen has turned him into

a slightly different person. He was a creature of that moment in that place, and now he's different. Coming up in the next episode, we're going to get another perspective on what life was like at Solomon Brothers in the nineteen eighties and early nineties. How do you think Liar's Poker would have been different if I'd have been a woman? Oh my gosh. I can only speak for myself. I don't think I could have been that balanced. I think women feel it deeper in a way. There were times

when I was sobbing. Or was the time I went to a lawyer and said, can I do something about this? You know I was treated poorly. Other people's Money is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show,

please remember to share a rate and review. You can buy our new Liars Poker audiobook, unabridged and read by me the author at Pushkin dot Fm, slash Liars Poker, and also at Audible define more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You were better with customers than anybody I'd ever seen. Really, yeah, because you believed in what you were selling, and that's

where that naivete thing comes in. And you know, it really served you well because the customers really didn't see you as a you know, as a used car sales. They saw you as a as a proselytizer. I had the ability to seem like I knew what I was talking about right when you actually had no clue.